Support for socialism is growing in the United States, but what voters believe could be a system that rewards ordinary people with more power could end up reducing their quality of life and handing the Trump administration more control…
Page A4From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 31 August 2026
Examiner: socialism polls well, performs badly, and in practice means more power for Trump
As it ran on the front
THE WORD DOING ALL THE WORK
Two headlines ran in the same outlet this week. One: socialism polls better than it performs. Two: socialism in practice means more power for the Trump administration, according to experts the same paper quotes. Read those in order and the trick reveals itself — the word 'socialism' isn't describing a policy anymore, it's a delivery mechanism, and what it's delivering, by the paper's own account, is more power to the guy currently in the Oval Office.…
…(cont) That's the tell. When a warning about creeping government control turns into an argument about the current administration's own consolidation, the word stopped being about economics a few paragraphs back. Nobody at that outlet is proposing single-payer next Tuesday. What they're doing is keeping a scary label radioactive, so when centralization happens under this administration, the readership's alarm gets pointed sideways — at an idea, not at the people actually holding the levers right now.
This is an old trick with new paint. You don't have to defend a specific policy if you can keep the word itself toxic. Meanwhile the actual, checkable fact sitting in that same paper is that more power is accumulating in one office, and the paper's own experts are the ones who said so. That's not a hypothetical about some future administration. That's a sentence about the current one, printed by a paper that is not exactly hostile to it.
The polling line does the rest of the work. 'Polls better than it performs' is a real, useful thing to say about a policy — people like guardrails until they see the price tag. Fine. But stapled next to a sentence about the sitting administration's own power growing, it reads less like an economics lesson and more like a warning label pointed at the wrong bottle.
Watch what the word is being used to distract from. The power is consolidating in the room they're not warning you about.
“Read those two headlines back to back and the trick shows itself — the word 'socialism' stopped describing a policy and started describing whatever power grab is already happening under this administration. The warning label's pointed at the wrong bottle, and the power's still consolidating in the room they're not warning you about.”
“Socialism is un-American, full stop, and any accumulation of power under this administration is efficiency, not socialism — did I just call consolidating power efficiency? That's — let's move on.”
The receipts
Nearly 6 in 10 Democrats view socialism positively while less than a third say the same of capitalism, according to a new CBS News/YouGov poll. That’s an ominous sign for this fall’s midterm elections, as socialist ideas increasingly vie…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.